Author: Robert Sirico
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1596988118
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Thirty years ago, the economic system of the Soviet empire—socialism—seemed definitively discredited. Today, the most popular figures in the Democratic Party embrace it, while the shapers of public opinion treat capitalism as morally indefensible. Is there a moral case for capitalism? Consumerism is an appalling spectacle. Free markets may be efficient, but are they fair? Aren’t there some things that we can’t afford to leave to the vicissitudes of the market? Robert Sirico, a onetime leftist, shows how a free economy—including private property, legally enforceable contracts, and prices and interest rates freely agreed to by the parties to a transaction—is the best way to meet society’s material needs. In fact, the free market has lifted millions out of dire poverty—far more people than state welfare or private charity has ever rescued from want. But efficiency isn’t its only virtue. Economic freedom is indispensable for the other freedoms we prize. And it’s not true that it makes things more important than people—just the reverse. Only if we have economic rights can we protect ourselves from government encroachment into the most private areas of our lives—including our consciences. Defending the Free Market is a powerful vindication of capitalism and a timely warning for a generation flirting with disaster.
Author: John Tomasi
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691158142
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
A provocative new vision of free market capitalism that achieves liberal ends by libertarian means Can libertarians care about social justice? In Free Market Fairness, John Tomasi argues that they can and should. Drawing simultaneously on moral insights from defenders of economic liberty such as F. A. Hayek and advocates of social justice such as John Rawls, Tomasi presents a new theory of liberal justice. This theory, free market fairness, is committed to both limited government and the material betterment of the poor. Unlike traditional libertarians, Tomasi argues that property rights are best defended not in terms of self-ownership or economic efficiency but as requirements of democratic legitimacy. At the same time, he encourages egalitarians concerned about social justice to listen more sympathetically to the claims ordinary citizens make about the importance of private economic liberty in their daily lives. In place of the familiar social democratic interpretations of social justice, Tomasi offers a "market democratic" conception of social justice: free market fairness. Tomasi argues that free market fairness, with its twin commitment to economic liberty and a fair distribution of goods and opportunities, is a morally superior account of liberal justice. Free market fairness is also a distinctively American ideal. It extends the notion, prominent in America's founding period, that protection of property and promotion of real opportunity are indivisible goals. Indeed, according to Tomasi, free market fairness is social justice, American style. Provocative and vigorously argued, Free Market Fairness offers a bold new way of thinking about politics, economics, and justice—one that will challenge readers on both the left and right.
Author: Michael J. Sandel
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429942584
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
In What Money Can't Buy, renowned political philosopher Michael J. Sandel rethinks the role that markets and money should play in our society. Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we put a price on human life to decide how much pollution to allow? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons, auctioning admission to elite universities, or selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In his New York Times bestseller What Money Can't Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes up one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets? Over recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. In Justice, an international bestseller, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he provokes a debate that's been missing in our market-driven age: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?
Author: Cameron Kawato
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780999318805
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 186
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Book Description
Whether you are in a college class, consuming the news, or watching a Hollywood movie, you will likely be fed the lie that capitalism is immoral. You'll be told that all of the world's ills spring from capitalism and we must replace it with communism or socialism. This book shows why those claims are simply untrue.
Author: Enrico Colombatto
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136668071
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 374
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Book Description
Free-market economics has attempted to combine efficiency and freedom by emphasizing the need for neutral rules and meta-rules. These efforts have only been partly successful, for they have failed to address the deeper, normative arguments justifying – and limiting – coercion. This failure has thus left most advocates of free-market vulnerable to formulae which either emphasize expediency or which rely upon optimal social engineering to foster different notions of the common will and of the common good. This book offers the reader a new perspective on free-market economics, one in which the defense of markets is no longer based upon the utilitarian claim that free markets are more efficient; rather, the defense of markets rests upon the moral argument that top-down coercive policy-making is necessarily in tension with the rights-based notion of justice typical of the Western tradition. In arguing for a consistent moral basis for the free-market view, we depart from both the Austrian and neoclassical traditions by acknowledging that rationality is not a satisfactory starting point. This rejection of rationality as the complete motivator for human economic behaviour throws constitutional economics and the law-and-economics tradition into new relief, revealing these approaches as governed by considerations derived by various notions of social efficiency, rather than by principles consistent with individual freedom, including freedom to choose. This book shows that the solution is in fact a better understanding of the lessons taught by the Scottish Enlightenment: the role of the political context is to ensure that the individual can pursue his own ends, free from coercion. This also implies individual responsibility, respect for somebody else’s preferences and for his entrepreneurial instincts. Social virtue is not absent from this understanding of politics, but rather than being defined through the priorities of policy-makers, it emerges as the outcome of interaction among self-determining individuals. The strongest and most consistent case for free-market economics, therefore, rests on moral philosophy, not on some version of static-efficiency theorizing. This book should be of interest to students and researchers focussing on economic theory, political economics and the philosophy of economic thought, but is also written in a non-technical style making it accessible to an audience of non-economists.
Author: Paul J. Zak
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400837367
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 387
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Book Description
Like nature itself, modern economic life is driven by relentless competition and unbridled selfishness. Or is it? Drawing on converging evidence from neuroscience, social science, biology, law, and philosophy, Moral Markets makes the case that modern market exchange works only because most people, most of the time, act virtuously. Competition and greed are certainly part of economics, but Moral Markets shows how the rules of market exchange have evolved to promote moral behavior and how exchange itself may make us more virtuous. Examining the biological basis of economic morality, tracing the connections between morality and markets, and exploring the profound implications of both, Moral Markets provides a surprising and fundamentally new view of economics--one that also reconnects the field to Adam Smith's position that morality has a biological basis. Moral Markets, the result of an extensive collaboration between leading social and natural scientists, includes contributions by neuroeconomist Paul Zak; economists Robert H. Frank, Herbert Gintis, Vernon Smith (winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics), and Bart Wilson; law professors Oliver Goodenough, Erin O'Hara, and Lynn Stout; philosophers William Casebeer and Robert Solomon; primatologists Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal; biologists Carl Bergstrom, Ben Kerr, and Peter Richerson; anthropologists Robert Boyd and Michael Lachmann; political scientists Elinor Ostrom and David Schwab; management professor Rakesh Khurana; computational science and informatics doctoral candidate Erik Kimbrough; and business writer Charles Handy.
Author: Samuel Bowles
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300221088
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
Should the idea of economic man—the amoral and self-interested Homo economicus—determine how we expect people to respond to monetary rewards, punishments, and other incentives? Samuel Bowles answers with a resounding “no.” Policies that follow from this paradigm, he shows, may “crowd out” ethical and generous motives and thus backfire. But incentives per se are not really the culprit. Bowles shows that crowding out occurs when the message conveyed by fines and rewards is that self-interest is expected, that the employer thinks the workforce is lazy, or that the citizen cannot otherwise be trusted to contribute to the public good. Using historical and recent case studies as well as behavioral experiments, Bowles shows how well-designed incentives can crowd in the civic motives on which good governance depends.
Author: Steve Forbes
Publisher: Crown Currency
ISBN: 0307951596
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 611
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Book Description
From Steve Forbes, the iconic editor in chief of Forbes Media, and Elizabeth Ames coauthors of How Capitalism Will Save Us—comes a new way of thinking about the role of government and the morality of free markets. Americans today are at a turning point. Are we a country founded on the values of freedom and limited government, as envisioned by the founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? Or do we want to become a European-style socialist democracy? What best serves the public good—freedom or Big Government? In Freedom Manifesto, Forbes and Ames offer a new twist on this historic debate. Today’s bloated and bureaucratic government, they argue, is anything but a force for compassion. Instead of assuring fairness, it promotes favoritism. Instead of furthering opportunity, it stifles economic growth. Instead of unleashing innovation and material abundance, its regulations and price controls create rigidity and scarcity. Not only are Big Government’s inefficient and ever-expanding bureaucracies ill-equipped to deliver on their promises—they are often guilty of the very greed, excess, and corruption routinely ascribed to the private sector. The only way to a truly fair and moral society, the authors say, is through economic freedom—free people and free markets. Throughout history, open markets have helped the poor and everyone else by unleashing unprecedented creativity, generating wealth, and raising living standards. Promoting trust, generosity, and democracy, economic freedom has been a more powerful force for individual rights, self-determination—and humanity—than any government bureaucracy. Freedom Manifesto captures the spirit of a new movement that is questioning old ideas about the morality of government and markets for the first time since the Great Depression. Going beyond the familiar explanations and sound bites, the authors provide a fully developed framework of “first principles” for a true understanding of the real moral and ethical distinctions between more and less government. This timely and provocative book shows why free markets and liberty are the only way to a better future and a fair and humane society.
Author: Virgil Henry Storr
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030184161
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
The most damning criticism of markets is that they are morally corrupting. As we increasingly engage in market activity, the more likely we are to become selfish, corrupt, rapacious and debased. Even Adam Smith, who famously celebrated markets, believed that there were moral costs associated with life in market societies. This book explores whether or not engaging in market activities is morally corrupting. Storr and Choi demonstrate that people in market societies are wealthier, healthier, happier and better connected than those in societies where markets are more restricted. More provocatively, they explain that successful markets require and produce virtuous participants. Markets serve as moral spaces that both rely on and reward their participants for being virtuous. Rather than harming individuals morally, the market is an arena where individuals are encouraged to be their best moral selves. Do Markets Corrupt Our Morals? invites us to reassess the claim that markets corrupt our morals.
Author: Andrew Bernstein
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761849696
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 146
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Book Description
This book is a concise explanation of capitalism's moral and economic superiority to socialism, including America's current mixed-economy welfare state. This volume offers a focused, essentialized, and condensed argument ideal for the layman who admires capitalism but lacking a succinct, accessible explanation of its moral and economic virtues.
